America's Fascination with Firearms

The rigors of the
country's frontier led to the proliferation of firearms
and a deeply ingrained pro-gun culture.

BY DAVID B. KOPEL

The World & I. October 2003.

Unlike most of the world's
people, many Americans view the possession of firearms
as the norm rather than the exception.

The European and Japanese feudal aristocracies
loathed firearms, because they eliminated the role of
the nobility in combat. Firearms democratized warfare,
penetrated armor, and allowed fighting from a distance,
thereby greatly reducing the importance of the
nobility's old skills with swords in close combat. In
Japan and much of Europe, the aristocracy promoted laws
restricting or prohibiting the possession of firearms,
especially handguns, by common people.

In continental Europe and England, hunting was
tightly controlled by the aristocracy. Common people
were often forbidden even to kill a rabbit that was
eating their crops on their own land. No sane governor
or legislature in the American colonies would have
attempted to impose European-style hunting or
gun-control laws, for such repressive laws would have
made it impossible for much of the American population
to survive.
Colonial laws generally required each household
to possess a firearm, for service in the militia and
other civil defense. Households that could not afford a
gun were often given "public arms" by the government to
keep at home.
Other English colonies did not have as rough a
frontier as the United States did. Canada's white
settlement was mostly peaceful, thanks to careful
government negotiations with the indigenous peoples. Nor
did Canada have a "Wild West" like the United States,
where citizens ubiquitously carried handguns for
protection, in the absence of effective law enforcement.
In Canada, though, the Mounted Police showed up when the
first railroad towns were being built. Order was imposed
from above.

Fight for independence

The American Revolution was
in part assisted by America's already well-developed gun
culture. The United States won independence through a
sustained armed popular revolt, as the Swiss (armed with
crossbows) had done beginning in 1291, when the first
three cantons battled for freedom from Austria.

Of the approximately 400,000 American men in
active service against Great Britain during the
Revolution, the militia amounted to about 165,000.
Although the militiamen turned in some miserable
performances, such as when those from Virginia fled at
Camden, South Carolina, in 1780, the irregular forces,
when supported by the Continental Army, could fight
effectively. For example, they did splendidly in the
1781 Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina--the turning
point of the war in the South--which set the stage for
the coup de grace at Yorktown, Virginia.

The militia played a major role in defeating
Gen. John Burgoyne's 1777 Saratoga campaign, which had
tried to isolate New England from the rest of the United
States. In 1778--79, the Kentucky militia, led by George
Rogers Clark, captured key British posts on the Wabash
River in the future states of Indiana and Illinois. The
victories helped legitimize America's claim to all
British territory east of the Mississippi, a claim that
Britain eventually recognized in the 1783 peace treaty.

In Washington's Partisan War: 1775--1783, Mark
W. Kwasny examines George Washington's use of the
militias in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. The
scholar writes that while those forces could not by
themselves defeat the Redcoats in a pitched battle, the
irregulars were essential to American success:
"Militiamen were available everywhere and could respond
to sudden attacks and invasions often faster than the
army could." Washington "used them in small parties to
harass and raid the army and to guard all the places he
could not send Continentals."

As the war came to an end, Washington wrote in
his 1783 "Circular to the States": "The Militia of this
Country must be considered as the Palladium of our
security, and the first effectual resort in case of
hostility."

State and federal constitutions

Beginning in 1774, when the
British army occupying Boston began confiscating the
inhabitants' firearms, the American Revolution confirmed
what the founders had learned from their studies of
ancient Greece and Rome, as well as from English and
French history: The possession of arms was essential to
the retention of political and civil rights.

Guns and Government

The "standard model" view of the Second
Amendment--that the Bill of Rights guarantees every
law-abiding adult the right to own guns--is accepted
by most constitutional experts.
Opponents of this view adhere to the "states' right"
theory, which claims the amendment only applies to
state militias' right to arms.
In more than 35 cases, the Supreme Court has ruled
that the Second Amendment refers to individuals'
right to gun ownership rather than the states'
right.
The founders wrote the amendment with the belief
that securing citizens' rights to arms would
discourage government tyranny.
When gun ownership is in the hands of ordinary
citizens who don't abuse the right, crime is
deterred, which makes society safer.
Cities that sue the gun industry are on shaky legal
ground, for their failure to keep criminals away
from guns is at least as big a factor in gun crimes
as the industry's manufacture of firearms.

Thus, starting with the Pennsylvania and North
Carolina constitutions in 1776, American state
constitutions have usually included a right to arms
provision. The federal constitution added the Second
Amendment in 1791.

The federal and state constitutions have helped
develop a "rights consciousness" far stronger than can
be found in any other nation. The very existence of
written rights--taught in school and upheld by the
courts--inculcates in people a greater and greater
determination to uphold their rights.

In this way, the rights consciousness engendered
by the written "right to arms" led to additional
protections for rights. Since 1963, the people of
Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho,
Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska,
Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Utah,
Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin have chosen,
either through their legislature or through a direct
vote, to add a right to arms to their state constitution
or to readopt the right to arms or strengthen an
existing right. In every state where the people have had
the opportunity to vote directly, they have voted for
the right to arms by overwhelming margins. In 1998,
Wisconsin voted the right to arms in a 74 percent
landslide.

One of the few other nations with an explicit right to arms in
its constitution is Mexico. As stated in Article 10:
"The inhabitants of the United Mexican States have the
right to possess arms in their homes for their security
and legitimate defense with the exception of those
prohibited by federal law and of those reserved for the
exclusive use of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and National
Guard. Federal law shall determine the cases, conditions
and place in which the inhabitants may be authorized to
bear arms."

The Mexican constitutional provision may create
some rights consciousness in that nation, although the
effect is undoubtedly diminished by the general cynicism
about the law, and the lack of respect given most
constitutional rights in that nation.

The NRA

The National Rifle
Association (NRA) is another cause and consequence of
America's gun culture. The group was founded in 1871 by
Union generals who were dismayed by poor Union
marksmanship during the Civil War. The Confederate
forces, having a higher percentage of farm boys who were
familiar with guns, had better marksmanship. The NRA is
not only the most powerful gun lobby in the world, it is
(according to Fortune magazine's annual ratings) the
most powerful lobby of any kind in the United States.
Three of the last four American presidents have been NRA
members, and one American president, Ulysses Grant,
served as NRA chief after his term ended.

The NRA is more successful than its foreign
counterparts because it operates in a better political
environment. Only Switzerland devolves more power than
the United States to local governments.

Party control of elected officials is weaker in
the United States than elsewhere, the political system
is less centralized, and the role of citizen political
activists is considerably greater than in most other
democracies. All of these factors give the NRA's four
million members a much greater ability to influence
elected officials than gun rights groups in other
countries have. In turn, the NRA's political successes
help preserve widespread participation in the shooting
sports and the ability to own guns for personal
protection. Because a large share of the population is
armed, the NRA has a large potential base of members and
activists.

Notably, modern supporters of the Second
Amendment, like their forbears of the founding era, are
quite sensitive to "slippery slope" arguments. The
experience of Great Britain suggests that these
activists are not mistaken. Early in the twentieth
century, Great Britain had almost no violent crime, no
gun control laws, and widespread gun ownership. During
the twentieth century, a variety of "moderate" licensing
and registration laws were imposed, enforced liberally,
and then, through secret administrative decrees from
London, enforced with greater and greater severity.
Currently, only about 4 percent of the British
population own guns lawfully. The fraction of the
population is much too small to resist the drive of the
Home Office bureaucracy for gradual gun prohibition.

American exceptionalism

While some Americans are
embarrassed that their nation has a distinctively strong
constitutional right to arms and a vigorous gun culture,
the United States consciously created itself to be
different from Europe. As a North Carolina Supreme Court
justice explained in the 1968 case of State v. Dawson,
"It was the very fact that the right to bear arms had
been infringed in England, and that this is a step
frequently taken by a despotic government, which caused
the adoption of the provision in the North Carolina
Declaration of Rights in 1776 and the insertion in the
Federal Bill of Rights of the Second Amendment."

The early republic's leading constitutional
commentators, St. George Tucker and William Rawle,
pointedly contrasted the robust American right to bear
arms with what they thought was a withered British
right. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story's famed
Commentaries on the Constitution also contrasted the
vigorous American right to bear arms with its feeble
British cousin.

The independent existence of the United States
came into being with a document whose opening words
affirm the right of the people to overthrow the
government. In Europe, armed masses represent disorder;
in the United States, they are the foundation of the
political order.

James Madison, in Federalist 46, extolled "the
advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess
over the people of almost every other nation," in
contrast with the kingdoms of Europe, whose "governments
are afraid to trust the people with arms." Madison
predicted that if the European peasantry were armed and
rebellious local governments (like American states)
existed, "the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be
speedily overturned."

Joel Barlow, a leading diplomat and author of
the 1780s and '90s, wrote about this in his book Advice
to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of
Europe. He said that in Europe, an armed populace would
be regarded "as a mark of an uncivilized people,
extremely dangerous to a well-ordered society." Barlow
contended that because the American system was built on
popular sovereignty, which brought out the best in man's
character, the people could be trusted with guns: "It is
because the people are civilized that they are with
safety armed."

Conversely, Revolutionary-era Americans thought
an unarmed populace was a sign of ethical decay. The
Continental Congress distinguished Americans "trained to
arms from the infancy and animated by love of liberty"
from the "debauched, dissipated, and disarmed" British.
We can assume that America's founders would not have
been surprised to see that starting in 1936 with
Hitler's Anschluss of Austria, European elites speedily
surrendered their nations to the Nazis, either before
the shooting began or a few weeks afterward.

Hitler repeatedly made plans for the invasion of
Switzerland, but they were never executed because German
casualties would have been immense. The Swiss militiaman
was under orders to fight to the last bullet, and after
that with his bayonet, and then with his bare hands.
Rather than having to defeat an army, Hitler would have
had to defeat a whole people.

Profound differences among nations

According to the Small Arms
Survey 2003, the European nations of Norway, Finland,
France, and Germany have the most

Origins of a Gun
Culture

The differences on gun-ownership rights that
separate the United States from most of Europe are
rooted in America's unique early history.
European nations limited firearm ownership to the
nobility, whereas the harsh conditions of the U.S.
frontier, absence of an aristocratic class, and need
for civil defense in early America fostered a
citizen gun culture.
This culture was boosted by the Revolution, by which
America became the first colony of its age to win
independence through a sustained armed popular
revolt.
The federal and state constitutions reflect the
belief that arms possession is key to upholding
political and civil rights, spurring citizens and
lobbyists to stand up for gun rights.
While Europeans see an armed populace as
uncivilized, Americans view the issue through the
lens of popular sovereignty, believing that gun
ownership makes society safer.

guns (about 30--39 per 100 persons); the
Netherlands, Hungary, and Romania the least (no more
than 2 guns per 100 persons). The survey estimates that
Americans own between 83 and 96 guns per 100 persons, or
nearly one per person.

But what most distinguishes American gun culture
even from prevailing attitudes in countries such as
Canada--which has a very strong hunting tradition and
rate of rifle ownership nearly as high as the U.S.
level--is that Americans connect gun ownership not just
to recreation but to survival and sovereignty. Because
about half of all American households own guns,
America's "home invasion" burglary rate is far lower
than in countries such as Britain, Canada, Ireland, and
the Netherlands, which prohibit defensive gun ownership.

About two-thirds of American states allow
law-abiding adults to obtain a permit to carry a
concealed handgun for lawful protection. Encouraged by
the NRA and other gun-rights groups, many of these
citizens carry their guns more frequently since
September 11. They know that in case of a terrorist
attack on a shopping center, school, church, or
synagogue, it will be America's citizens who will be
responsible for taking immediate action to save their
fellow Americans.

Such preparations for civil defense are
appalling to American gun-prohibition advocates and
their international allies. At both the personal and the
national level, Americans tend to expect to protect
themselves by force, and Europeans tend to expect a
superior entity to do it for them. The cultural
differences between America and Europe are in some ways
just as profound in the early twenty-first century as
they were in the late eighteenth.

Small Arms Survey. Annual yearbooks and occasional
papers, available at www.smallarmssurvey.org.

A variety of scholarly journal articles by David B.
Kopel on foreign gun laws are available for free on
Kopel's Web site, www.davekopel.org.
David B. Kopel (www.davekopel.org)
is research director at the Independence Institute and
an associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute. He is
author of numerous books and articles on firearms law
and policy, including The Samurai, the Mountie, and the
Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other
Democracies?

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